Onwards…

I can’t tell you how lovely it was to have a luxuriously  hot shower last night.

Of course it is perfectly possible to have a hot shower in the camper van, and we do, every night, but both water and heat are at a premium, and so extreme care must be taken. You drench yourself and turn the shower off, then rub in shampoos and soaps and other preferred unguents, shave anything hairy, and then turn the shower back on again to rinse it all away. This is functional but not exactly hedonistic.

Last night we steamed and scrubbed and wallowed, after which I dried my hair with the hairdryer. I can do this in the camper van as well, and indeed, would have looked very much better if I had bothered to do it, because I have the sort of hair that repays neglect by curling in every direction possible, and then standing up on end.

I thought, correctly as it turns out, that this would not matter in the least on Orkney, where everybody looks as though they have just been blown over a hedge by a sixty mile an hour gale, because they have been.

It felt lovely to be polished and brushed.

In the end we thought that we would go out to work after all tonight. This was not because we were expecting any kind of financial triumph, but because we do not have an alternate routine for a Night At Home. Most people wear themselves out at work all day, and then go home to rest and relax. We rush about doing busy things at home all day, and then slope off to work to loaf about and read books and eat things.

It seemed like an utter waste of an evening to be reading books without earning money. We sat by the fire and yawned and wondered if we should go to bed, and Mark read a book about the history of London, and I read a book about compost, until we were so sleepy that we thought we really ought to go to bed, even though it was only nine o’ clock.

I remember being young and thinking how very thrilling it would be to be a grown up. I was not interested in compost in those days.

Despite such an improbably early night, we did not wake up early today, and it was almost half past ten before we made a start on the day’s affairs.

Mark has started installing the new kitchen. He cut a big hole in the carpet and took a piece of it out. Then he spent ages measuring things and bashing bits of wood about, and making little speculative noises and swearing occasionally. He made a lot of sawdust on the floor and measuring marks on the walls. Then eventually he brought some cupboards in out of the conservatory and stood them on some of the bits of wood that he had nailed down to the floor.

The cupboards have got legs of their own but he has taken them off. He says that this is because they are rubbish and some of them are missing. I do not know why this has meant that he needed to nail lots and lots of wood to the floor when he could just have propped half a brick under the places where the missing legs should be, but he has done it anyway, so I am sure that it must be a good idea. Anyway, it took him all day.

He had just finished when it occurred to me that we could make it on a higher level with a step up, because I think I might quite like that. I suggested it but he just said some rude things about being married so I don’t know if he is going to do that or not.

I thought that it would be nice to keep him company, and so when I had finished doing washing and generally faffing about I spent the rest of my day painting some leaves on the stairs. I started doing this months and months ago, but have never got around to finishing it, so today I thought I would make it happen.

I haven’t finished it yet, it is going to take ages, but I have done the worst of the difficult to get to bits at the bottom, where my knees make it awkward to stand up afterwards.

It was a thoroughly productive day, and now we are at work. I am feeling very pleased with us.

It has been brilliant to travel to the end of the world. The thing we have got to do now is have an adventure at home. We will get on with our lives again, and it will all be so interesting that we will not at all want to buy a ruined smithy on the Orkney Islands. We will be excited to be here, at home, in the Lake District, tootling around contentedly, making things.

I am looking forward to the next few months very much.